A Federated Learning Approach to Breast Cancer Prediction in a Collaborative Learning Framework

Healthcare (Basel). 2023 Dec 17;11(24):3185. doi: 10.3390/healthcare11243185.

Abstract

Breast cancer continues to pose a substantial worldwide public health concern, necessitating the use of sophisticated diagnostic methods to enable timely identification and management. The present research utilizes an iterative methodology for collaborative learning, using Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to construct a breast cancer detection model with a high level of accuracy. By leveraging Federated Learning (FL), this collaborative framework effectively utilizes the combined knowledge and data assets of several healthcare organizations while ensuring the protection of patient privacy and data security. The model described in this study showcases significant progress in the field of breast cancer diagnoses, with a maximum accuracy rate of 97.54%, precision of 96.5%, and recall of 98.0%, by using an optimum feature selection technique. Data augmentation approaches play a crucial role in decreasing loss and improving model performance. Significantly, the F1-Score, a comprehensive metric for evaluating performance, turns out to be 97%. This study signifies a notable advancement in the field of breast cancer screening, fostering hope for improved patient outcomes via increased accuracy and reliability. This study highlights the potential impact of collaborative learning, namely, in the field of FL, in transforming breast cancer detection. The incorporation of privacy considerations and the use of diverse data sources contribute to the advancement of early detection and the treatment of breast cancer, hence yielding significant benefits for patients on a global scale.

Keywords: breast cancer; collaborative learning; deep neural networks; federated learning; prediction.